Welcome to the manuscript version of the sinner’s excuse! “Sure, I’m bad, but no worse than the guy next door.”

The Oldest and Best Manuscripts?

Modern New Testament Textual Criticism (NTTC) is “the study of ancient manuscripts to try to discover the original text of Scripture.” In my last post NTTC, I looked at the field’s worst assumption, often stated (with varied wording): “Very early New Testament scribes weren’t careful.” I’d like to go on to the unstated but frequently applied rule that is drawn from it, in my opinion the worst rule in NTTC:

It doesn’t matter if a copy is sloppy.

Previous Posts on NTTC

A Closing Question

That fifth post looked at the work of Fenton John Anthony Hort, who is sort of the father of modern New Testament Textual Criticism. I discussed how a naturalistic evolutionary philosophy affected Hort’s approach. (If you missed it, you might want to read that post first.) I closed with this:

Was there any evidence for this evolutionary assumption, and why does it matter?

Evidence for Hort’s Assumption

F.J.A. Hort would answer, “All early manuscripts show carelessness, and later manuscripts show a different attitude. My assumption is correct — ‘very early New Testament scribes weren’t careful.‘”

How do we know scribes were careless? Obvious errors: nonsensical wording, spelling errors, doubled words (a word or several words copied twice in a row), skipped or repeated lines, and singular readings (unmatched by any other manuscript in any language). Careful scribes made few such mistakes, careless scribes many. The early surviving manuscripts have many such errors. Hort (from his Introduction) on his three favourites:

Vaticanus: “on the one hand reached by no means a high standard of accuracy, and on the other his slips are not proportionally numerous or bad.” (“Proportionally” is comparing to the other “oldest” manuscripts Hort had.) — page 233.

Sinaiticus: “…all the ordinary lapses due to rapid and careless transcription are more numerous…. The singular readings are very numerous….” — page 246.

More could be said, and many papyri are even worse, but the evidence is clear. The earliest manuscripts we have today show a remarkable lack of scribal effort to accurately copy the exact words of the text.

Based only on the oldest manuscripts surviving today,
Hort was right.

Problems with Hort’s Conclusion

It is based on:

Small sample size. The oldest existing manuscripts today were a tiny portion of the manuscript picture in the early centuries. (See on the Pericope Adulterae).

Biased sample. The conclusion relies primarily on Egyptian manuscripts, which tell us nothing of attitudes or scribal behaviour in Syria, Turkey, Greece, Italy, or elsewhere.

Flawed Bibliology — based on the Roman Catholic / Anglican view that the canon was a late product of church councils (see The Canon of Scripture for a Biblical response).

Dubious assumption — that committed believers who endured persecution were not dedicated enough to care about the words of Scripture.

Evidence open to alternate interpretation — little-used manuscripts which were rarely copied (see Is the Oldest Best? for a possible explanation contrary to Hort’s).

There are too many holes in Hort’s theory. Of the perhaps millions of Bible manuscripts by 200 A.D., we have parts of perhaps ten, all apparently from one region. Is that enough to accuse all early believers everywhere of textual carelessness? His conclusion ultimately relies on his Anglican / Catholic view of the canon.

The Worst Rule

It doesn’t matter if a copy is sloppy.

Or — “it doesn’t really matter if a scribe wasn’t careful.” If no early scribes were careful (as most textual scholars say), sloppy copies are the best we’ll get, so it doesn’t matter if we know the scribe was careless. According to these scholars, later (careful) copies come from earlier sloppy copies, so we might as well use the early slop. It’s the manuscript version of the sinner’s excuse: “Sure, I’m bad, but no worse than the guy next door.”

This rule is rarely stated, but it effectively exists. Hort admitted his favourite, Vaticanus, isn’t very accurate. Despite saying Bezae has “prodigious” error, in the same paragraph he called it “often invaluable for the recovery of the true text.” Bezae, Vaticanus, and Sinaiticus are considered “important witnesses,” the best manuscripts, though no scholars claim they were carefully copied. These were all “sloppy copies” — but it doesn’t matter, and that is the worst rule in NTTC.

What do YOU Think When You Read “Best”?

When you read “the oldest and best manuscripts,” what do you think — that someone took an accurate manuscript, and carefully copied its words to another manuscript? That is what most people think: “best” means “accurately copied from an accurate source.”

When a textual scholar says a copy is “best,” he does NOT mean an accurate manuscript was carefully copied to make a new accurate copy. The “best” manuscripts were copied by scribes who weren’t particularly careful at all. To the NTTC scholar, “best” means it matches up well to other “rules” of textual criticism — oldest copy, shortest reading, etc.

Three “Worsts” of NTTC

The worst assumption: every early manuscript was a “sloppy copy.”The worst rule, drawing on that assumption: it doesn’t matter if a copy is sloppy.

The worst wording: “best manuscripts” — it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

When you read “best manuscripts,” it doesn’t mean “accurately copied.” The person who wrote it may think it means that, but textual scholars know it doesn’t. Those that are called “oldest and best” are sloppy copies. You don’t have to take my word for it — even F.J.A. Hort said they weren’t particularly accurate.

If political correctness is more important than simple factual correctness, how far down that slippery slope does one need go before correctness (and truth) become completely irrelevant?
I may be in a minority of one, but that does not make me “wrong” if I am factually correct and truthful 🙂 Lonely, yes.

I hope you aren’t looking for sympathy over that kind of loneliness, Angus. You’ve come to the wrong place. 🙂

It’s interesting how many people accept Hort’s work without ever reading him and stopping to think about it. Things become popular, and as Kent said, it becomes politically incorrect to challenge the Wisdom Receptus of NTTC.

My intended next post in the series will be even more “politically incorrect” — “Hort vs. The Oldest Manuscripts”.